While the number of conversions in Israel rose slightly in 2010, there was a significant drop in the number of soldiers who signed up for the military’s Nativ conversion courses, according to data presented at the Knesset’s Aliya, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee on Tuesday.

According to Col. Orna Asoulin, who is in charge of manpower in the IDF Manpower Directorate, the reason there were 82 fewer soldiers in the Nativ course in 2010 than in 2009 (when some 800 took part), was the public uproar over the conversions.

For decades, Jews around the world have been advocating that conversions of all major streams in Judaism be equally recognized in Israel.

Yet, even after the High Court of Justice ordered the State to recognize Reform and Conservative conversions, grant the converts rights under the Law of Return and register them as Jews - still none of these converts can legally marry in Israel.

I will attempt here to present the arguments against the Rabbinate as reflected by the responses to the recent pay raise.

Firstly, the Rabbinate has become the “military wing” of the haredi community. Through it, the haredim abuse the rest of the population.

...Secondly, the Rabbinate is perceived as a corrupt body that produces nothing but jobs for its close associates.

...Thirdly, there’s the issue of the economic situation and market conditions.

The coercion, the costs, the hunger for power, and the translation of Judaism into money all prompt open hostility towards the Rabbinate and Judaism. The solution can apparently be found in the American model...

The national-religious candidate for the position of Jerusalem’s chief rabbi warned against a reality in which the capital becomes a city for religious Jews only, and called for more tolerance – from both secular and religious residents – to prevent such a scenario.

“It must be a capital for all the people, a united city,” Rabbi Aryeh Stern said on Wednesday.

Metzger also confirmed a weekend report in haredi newspaper Bakehila, where he was quoted as saying that even if the recently proposed bill to enable chief rabbis to contend for another term passes in the Knesset – something he doubts will happen – he still would not seek another 10-year stint in the position.

He made sure to add that if senior rabbis – such as those who helped him attain the position of chief rabbi – ordered him to seek a second term, he would have to heed to them, despite the fact that he had prepared to step down after holding the position for a decade when his term ends in 2013.

Dr. Zohar is Chauncy Stillman Professor of Sephardic Law and Ethics at Bar Ilan University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. This article appears in issue 10 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

In this article, I survey and analyze major stages in the fascinating growth of extremist positions on conversion to Judaism (giyyur) within Israeli rabbinic circles in recent years, up to September 2010.

(The current hot-spot of controversy, relating to giyyur within the Israeli Defense Forces, is still “in process” and thus not covered here.)

Throughout the article I make some general observations, and toward the end I also make draw some conclusions as to what all this reveals. Hopefully, the reader will gain some insights into interesting aspects of the history and the contemporary reality of the Orthodox rabbinic world in Israel.

Rosh Chodesh Adar Aleph was a cold, rainy, dreary morning. A security guard at the Kotel stopped me and two other women and insisted that we could not go into the plaza with our tallit bags because “Women are not allowed to have a tallit at the Wall.” We argued until they finally let us in.

I volunteered to take a shift holding the sefer Torah outside the plaza so I had a good view of the security guards as they opened all the women’s bags. Men were allowed to walk right in. When my relief arrived, the guards would not allow me back in wearing my tallit under my coat. I argued in my best beginner’s Hebrew.

I refused to remove my tallit and I refused to leave. My relief went back to the Kotel and brought back our female police officer, and she escorted me into the plaza. I felt a little like Rosa Parks.

“If women are silent and passive these prohibitions and decrees with grow and we will find ourselves being told not only where to go, how to dress, what to say and carry but also how to breath,” said Anat Hoffman chair of Women of the Wall.

This year, the Daniel Centers reached a critical milestone. Their Judaic education work in Tel Aviv’s elementary schools has been recognized by Israel’s Ministry of Education in the most concrete and tangible way, with a $30,000 renewable grant. Joining the Daniel Centers in receiving a first ever government grant to a Reform organization involved in Judaic education is the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism.

Asked "In which of the following areas should religious education improve?" more than half of respondents (58%) said it should stop segregating itself from the Israeli society.

Seventeen percent believe religious education should reduce its involvement in politics and stop sending its students to political protests. Seven percent said it should be "more serious" in terms of religion, and 5% stated that it should become less elitist. Five percent chose other points for improvement, and 8% did not respond.

Rabbi Dr. Benny Lau has called on the national-religious public to reduce its dependence on rabbis and become "free".

According to Lau, the blind obedience which has infiltrated the Zionist-religious society in recent years is an inappropriate phenomenon stemming from a "paralysis of fear".

He implied that criticism against religion, even if it causes some people to leave, is not as serious as blind obedience: "The crisis of those who make themselves a rabbi and hope to avoid doubt is seven times bigger than that of a person who made choices and didn’t find his way."

After trying so many ineffective PR methods, perhaps we would do well to go back to the simple approach – the Bible. After all, we are speaking to the Christian and Muslim worlds. These two religions recognize the Biblical story, the Bible’s truth and its sanctity. Both religions admit that the Jewish People is the people of the Bible.

So instead of seeking security arguments to justify our right for this land and for Jerusalem, let’s go back to our roots and speak the Biblical language which the world understands.

The poll also showed that the more religious the public, the more positive its stand towards rabbis as moderators: Thirty-five percent of the ultra-Orthodox public see the rabbis as reconcilers, compared to only 6.7% of seculars.

On the other hand, 63% of seculars see rabbis as an element worsening the conflict, compared to 5% of haredim.

The new instruction program, called "The Bible on Facebook", was developed by Dr. Ilan Abekasis and Shirley Natan-Yulzari, experts in Bible teaching from the Levinsky College of Education, and it is aimed at teaching the students the Bible profession by surfing in the social network.

This year I'm still ambivalent. Sadly, while there has been physical reunification, we seem more fragmented and less unified than ever on the spiritual / political front.

Things have gotten so bad with some sectors of the haredim that the police are afraid to go into Mea Shearim (I'm not kidding, you can read about it here).

It seems like the haredim are mad at everyone: they battle the modern Orthodox over conversions, the Reform and Conservative are heretics, and they don't want to let the secular do what they want on Shabbat without interference.

A special conference was held in Israel this past week on the subject of “Religion and Peace: Peace in Monotheistic Traditions.”

The conference was initiated by the International Organization for Comparative Ecclesiastical History (CIHEC), an international academic organization which brings together scholars of history and theology, mainly in Europe and the U.S. It included discussions about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

The Tel Aviv municipality is giving serious consideration to a proposal meant to facilitate divorces in the city.

No city in Israel currently offers divorce services to its residents on a regular basis, but a few months ago Dlayahu's group launched a pilot program in Ramat Gan, where the municipality reports that it has been very successful.

Dr. Elan Ezrachi, a native of Jerusalem is an independent educational consultant to international Jewish organizations, and a chair of a community council in Jerusalem.

Throughout my adult life, I have felt that living in Jerusalem is somehow counter-cultural, going against the norms of most of my peers and likeminded people.

What is it about Jerusalem that compels its best and brightest to leave? Why do Israeli friends of mine constantly ask me how I can still live in the city or wonder when I’m going to move to Tel Aviv already?

In Israel, when crowds of religious, patriotic young men have an occasion to celebrate, they put their arms around each other and dance. If I try to imagine their American cultural analogs (flag waving, beer-drinking, church-going sports fans) doing the same, it’s laughable, but in Israel, it seems quite normal.

Today, June 1st, is Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, marking the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. This is both an Israeli state holiday and a rabbinically mandated minor religious holiday, which means it's celebrated both with parades and liturgy.

I'll admit that this mixing of politics and religion makes me deeply uncomfortable. Attributing military and political victories to God is a step further down the slippery slope of political demagoguery than I'd like to take.

I have joined this pilgrimage several times over the years, since my first visit as a curious teenager. This year I went again, with a small group of British gap-year students.

We started on top of Mt. Meiron, the highest mountain in Israel (until we conquered Mt. Hermon in the Golan), where we could look down on the hundreds of buses lined up to shuttle pilgrims to and from the site, as the highway was closed in the area.

...Herzl imagined the Jewish State as a kind of fin-de-siecle Vienna on the Mediterranean. Good thing he didn't live to see what became of his vision. When we get carried away with our own visions of modern or post-modern high-tech Israel, it's good to come to Meiron for a bit of a reality (?) check.

Judith Landau was born in London and made aliya in 1976. She lives and works in Jerusalem and has five children and seven grandchildren. This article appears in issue 10 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

The empowerment of women today in Modern Orthodox society in Israel is a direct result of the number and range of education opportunities now available—and a very welcome and necessary development considering the multiple halakhic issues affecting them.

The emergence of Batei Midrash for women and the courses provided at all levels—from the high school to midrasha to adult education—have bred a new generation of learned women who have become active members in the community and participants in the halakhic decision-making framework in issues pertaining to them.

As cyber-activism and Facebook revolutions sweep the Middle East, 150 Jewish social and business entrepreneurs, technology whizzes, thinkers and artists from Hong Kong to Zagreb, Sao Paulo to San Francisco, and Melbourne to Beersheva, will converge on Jerusalem for the ROI Global Summit of Young Jewish Innovators, to connect and create new tools and novel approaches to shape the Jewish world and beyond.

Essentially, Rabbi Yanklowitz argues that Judaism's values prompt us to not only live in Israel, but also to fulfill our national mission in the Diaspora. To put it bluntly, he's wrong, not only Judaically, but factually as well.

It's best, I think, to rebut his short essay point by point.

... Sadly, Rabbi Yanklowitz has, through a series of logical jumps that are both specious and unrelated, transformed that important feeling of guilt and anxiety into a positive. Don't feel bad not making aliyah. You're not supposed to. You should repair the world!

...But now a new and unexpected stop with no historical or religious relevance has been added to the list: Ra’anana, one of the main hubs of Israel’s hi-tech industry.

Thousands of Birthright participants gathered on Tuesday night at an auditorium in the upper-middle class suburb of Tel Aviv for the group’s semi-annual Mega-event.

Earlier in the day, Birthright groups visited nearby software companies like Amdocs, HP and Microsoft to learn about the Silicon Wadi, Israel’s equivalent of the Silicon Valley. Participants met with management and heard lectures.

Twenty juniors and seniors from top U.S. universities are taking part in an exclusive summer fellowship, mentored by CEOs of leading companies in Israel, as part of an initiative to create a cadre of future Jewish business and technology leaders who are closely connected to Israel and the Israeli private sector.

All this is simply a reflection of the decreased role of “peoplehood” in Judaism. What we are witnessing is a Protestantization of American Jewish life.

By and large, today’s rabbinical students did not grow up in homes that were richly Jewish. More often than not, these students came to their Jewish commitments as a result of individual journeys on which they embarked.

Facing a hard choice of letting people go or cutting salaries, the Jewish Agency for Israel and its union have agreed that employees across the board will donate six free work days in 2011, a source said.

This decision will affect approximately 500 people who will each give a free day of work a month until the end of the year.

The Schechter Institute is seriously endangering its academic credentials by announcing it will give students a passing grade this semester if a current teachers strike has not ended by Monday, the institution's workers committee said this week.

The teachers added that the president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Rabbi David Golinkin, lacks the authority to pass students in lieu of a settlement.

Rabbi Elli Fischer is a writer, translator, and editor from Modiin. He serves as a gabbai at Kehillat Shaarei Yonah Menachem

After all, Israeli society has turned out to be a cholent pot: Not a melting pot in which the identities of the ingredients are homogenized, nor a salad bowl in which each element remains unaffected by the elements around it.

In a cholent pot, each ingredient retains its identity even as it adds and absorbs flavor, scent, and texture from every other ingredient.

Rabbi Andrew Sacks is the Director of the Masorti [Conservative] Movement's Rabbinical Assembly in Israel

Let me add that I believe that there is more than one way to be a Zionist. I chose the path of Aliyah. Others express their Zionism differently.

But there is one thing we all have in common – we support the State of Israel. We do not always support the government or its policies. We may be deeply critical. But we love Israel deeply enough that we are obliged to criticize. We do so in order to build a Zionist State that reflects the values we feel must be a part of our Jewish State.

I read with great sadness and considerable anger the editorial in the May 6 Jewish Ledger by Carol Greenwald, Ph.D., about the selection of Rabbi Richard Jacobs as President of the Union for Reform Judaism.

Rabbi Sid Schwarz is the founder of the PANIM Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values and the author of “Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World.” He is currently a senior fellow at CLAL and the director of the Jewish Journey Project in New York.

I had the privilege of being one of 120 participants at a unique conference that took place in mid-May. Siach (conversation) was a gathering of Jewish social justice and environment professionals from Israel, Europe and the United States.

...I am keenly aware of the large gap between Israel and the diaspora. This gathering convinced me that the gap is even larger than I feared.

American Jewish culture has flowered independently of Israel, too. If there is to be a new consensus on Israel, perhaps it should be founded on the dignity of Jewish life outside of Israel, alongside the bravery of Jewish life in Israel.

The main point of disagreement was Yishai's reluctance to extend the fasting hours on Yom Kippur. According to the new plan, Yom Kippur will take place during DST about fifty percent of time. Yishai consulted with religious authorities before adopting his position.

The matter will now go to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, which will also hear private members' bills on the issue.

After numerous delays the Kehat committee has submitted its findings on daylight saving time, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai is expected to announce his decision on the matter next Monday.

...Meanwhile, public pressure has grown, and online petitions are calling on Yishai to establish a normal daylight saving time.

After all, Yishai is not obliged to accept the committee's recommendations. He can turn the tables upside down and make a brave decision - Israel will adopt the European Union's daylight saving time, implementing it between the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October.

A special Knesset committee established for examine daylight saving time has submitted their recommendation to Interior Minister Eli Yishai of Shas. Yishai organized the committee.

Yishai has said that he has not yet reached any final conclusions based on the report submitted to him recently, and will take the week to complete his inspections and will publish the decision thereafter.

A modest stone building holy to Jews in the midst of this Arab city is becoming an increasingly volatile friction point, drawing growing numbers of pilgrims on nighttime prayer visits, unnerving Palestinian residents and putting Israel’s military into conflict with some of the worshippers it is meant to protect.

The monthly trips by religious Jews to this largely hostile city, coordinated with Palestinian security forces, emphasize the complexity of the Holy Land’s religious landscape and the sometimes deadly intersection of the sacred and the political.

The Israel Defense Forces strongly criticized Israeli worshippers who made their way to Joseph's Tomb in Nablus on their own early yesterday morning, saying they had endangered soldiers and themselves and risked a confrontation with the Palestinian Authority.

More than 200 worshippers entered Nablus without authorization after they could not find seats on the buses to the grave that had been organized by the army in coordination with the PA. The buses brought some 1,600 people to the tomb.

As the succession war in Haifa's Seret-Viznitz Hasidic sect heats up, one of the warring parties has resorted to the Internet as a weapon.

In recent weeks, video footage has begun circulating in emails and on the ultra-Orthodox website Behadrei Haredim that shows Rabbi Baruch Hager, grandson of the sect's current admor (rabbinic leader ), maligning key leaders of Haifa's Viznitz community to his 86-year-old grandfather and even managing to get the admor to speak out against them.

Yoel Krois decided in recent months to take a temporary break from the holy wars he ordinarily wages as the unofficial "sheriff" of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim, in Jerusalem.

The battles against men and women walking together on Mea She'arim's sidewalks, against bus company Egged, against the Gay Pride Parade and against the Haredi politicians who sit in the infidels' Knesset - all of these can evidently wait, because Krois, a member of the extremist religious faction Eda Haredit, has a burning mission that keeps him glued to his storage room for days and nights: uploading his personal archive of 20,000 pashkevils, or street posters, to the digital collection of the National Library of Israel.

Hiddush has recently created a visual representation of a consistent theme in the Jewish tradition hailing the primacy of work as means to earn a living rather than living off public charity (and materially gain from the study of Torah).

Police are reluctant to enter the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea She'arim because of residents' violence, a police spokesman said during a recent court hearing over the remand of a neighborhood resident.

A police official said in court Thursday that the reason the police had not arrested a wanted man for more than a month, despite knowing where in Mea She'arim he was, was that every time they go into the neighborhood police property is damaged and they do not want unnecessary confrontations.

The ultra-Orthodox central city of Bnei Brak has found a twin sister overseas – Lakewood, New Jersey, which also has a very large haredi community.

Many in the haredi public hoped that the move would bring some money into Bnei Brak, one of the poorest cities in Israel, but Asher rushed to lower expectations. "We're not here to 'schnorr' and to enrich the municipality's treasury. This is not our goal."

Nonetheless, Asher said he expected businesspeople from Lakewood investing in Israel to settle in Bnei Brak's new business center, as "their taxes will be a great contribution to the city".

Because of the freeze, real estate prices in Jerusalem are skyrocketing proportionally well beyond any other city in the country.

That is the main reason for the fact that the young people are abandoning the capital, and not, according to the slanderous claims of people with vested interests, because of Haredization.

Haredization does in fact exist and is burdensome, but it is actually those who want to prevent the domination of the Haredim who must lead the movement to prevent the departure of the secular population. In effect they are doing the opposite: They are waging a scare campaign, exaggerated for the most part, to cause people to become disgusted with life in the capital.

Dr. Shalva Weil is a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is a specialist in Indian Jewry and is the Founding Chairperson of the Israel-India Cultural Association

The tomb was even known by the Bene Israel of Bombay as one of the holiest sites to Jews over the generations even though they were disconnected from world Jewry. It symbolized fertility, and is of special significance to Jewish women. Rachel's birthday, which falls on the 11th day of the lunar month of Heshvan, has become a day of pilgrimage for thousands of Jewish women, who come from all over Israel to pray for their loved ones or themselves.

For many years, Israelis of German descent boycotted German products, refused to set foot on German soil and severed all ties with the country they were born in. But now, their own children and grandchildren are fighting for the right to become German citizens.

According to a new study, some 100,000 Israelis possess a German passport.

Austria's Jewish community is taking an Israeli organization to court in a bid to force it to return a trove of historical documents.

At issue is archive material about the Austrian capital's once vibrant Jewish community that survivors of the Nazi era loaned to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem after World War II.

The Ma'aleh Adumim local council is demanding that the loudspeakers announcing the Muslim call to prayer from some mosques in the adjacent Palestinian village of al-Eizariya be turned down because the volume is disturbing residents of the settlement, Palestinian sources told Haaretz.

Indonesian historian Azyumardi Azra, one of the world’s leading scholars of moderate Islam says Islam and Judaism can learn from each other.

This was his first visit to Israel, and besides his surprise over how green the country was, he noted how Jerusalem’s Old City was full of Muslims, Christians and Jews – a meeting place of Abrahamic faiths. But despite the religions’ common ground, the Middle East is not a place of religious tolerance.

These are the people who hide behind talk of “bodily desecration,” rather than take a more nuanced view of the donation process. It boggles my mind to think that you, a Jew, might not want to save another person’s life.

Each individual Jew is, however, responsible for enforcing the prohibition not to show mercy. It is forbidden to sell fields or houses in Israel to non-Jews that do not keep the seven laws of the sons of Noah. It follows, therefore, that it is forbidden to give any Arab that is not considered a ‘ger toshav’ any part of the Land of Israel.

Hundreds of parents belonging to the religious Zionism movement are losing sleep over this problem. Rabbis are shocked by the extent of this phenomenon.

No, we are not talking about the future of the settlements or the level of education in the State of Israel: The religious public is concerned over the "bachelorhood phenomenon" – thousands of young men and women who have reached the age of 30 without getting married.

David Maria Jaeger, a Catholic priest who converted from Judaism, will be installed this morning as a prelate auditor of the Roman Rota, a papal law court that serves as the chief appellate court of the Catholic Church.

Jaeger has come a long way from his youth in downtown Tel Aviv. He attended Bilu Elementary School, at that time a school for Tel Aviv's religious Zionist bourgeoisie, studied at the Zeitlin religious high school and from there, went all the way to the Holy See's highest court.

Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.

In 2003 a committee of ministers dealing with immigration and absorption decided to erect a monument for the demoralization of the Ethiopian Jews who lost their lives en-route to Jerusalem, on Mount Herzl. The government decided an official memorial service would be held on Mount Herzl on the Jewish date of 28th of Iyar, symbolically coinciding with Jerusalem Reunification Day.

In March 2007 the monument was inaugurated. It was designed by architect Gabriel Kertesz, in cooperation with the Ethiopian community, incorporating monologues written by Ethiopian Jews describing their village life in Ethiopia, their yearning for Jerusalem and the hardships of the journey to Israel.

The writer works for the government and is completing an MA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In our community’s first years in Israel, there were only a few places that mentioned the story of the Ethiopian journey and only a few small monuments. But 30 years later, there are memorial ceremonies that take place in schools, municipalities and youth camps.

The Israeli government is failing to adequately assist and support the thousands of Ethiopian Jews currently waiting in the city of Gondar to make aliya and is not properly preparing itself for the absorption of this group of immigrants, leaders of the Ethiopian community here and representatives of non-profits working in Ethiopia said this week.

For the first time in the history of Israeli restrictions on Jewish entry to the Temple Mount, the recitation of the Priestly Blessing was permitted there. It happened on Wednesday, Jerusalem Reunification Day, when hundreds of visitors – all of whom immersed in a mikveh (ritual bath) prior to coming and took other precautions required by Jewish Law – were allowed to enter the Temple Mount in groups of 30-40.

Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, co-founder of the Nefesh B’Nefesh English speakers’ aliyah movement, Former MK Rabbi Chanan Porat, who helped re-establish the community of Kfar Etzion after the 1967 Six Day War following his service as a paratrooper, and recently retired director of the Mossad, Meir Dagan were the recipients of the 2011 Moskowitz Prize for Zionism.

Highlighting her organization’s “excellent cooperation” with Israel in a variety of fields including education, culture, science and communications, the director-general of UNESCO said Sunday in Jerusalem that she had been “disappointed” by the process whereby UNESCO’s Executive Board last October passed five resolutions hostile to Israel.

She also inaugurated the “UNESCO for Tolerance and Peace Square” in Haifa, in the company of the city’s mayor Yona Yahav. At the ceremony dedicating the square, she praised the mixed Jewish- Arab city as an exemplar of coexistence and dialogue between all population sectors.

Ms. Bokova was speaking at a special ceremony held in the Baha'i gardens to inaugurate the UNESCO for Tolerance and Peace Square, situated at the point where Haifa's historic German Templer colony meets the terraced gardens of the Shrine of the Bab.